Last Sunday, Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami Secretary General Mia Golam Parwar made a strange claim: the Arakan Army had entered the Chittagong Hill Tracts and organized Arakanese New Year functions with the tribal civilian population of that area, many of whom are tied to the Arakanese and tribals from northeast India by ties of blood, religion, and, of course, history.

Mia Parwar, in a strongly worded statement, condemned what he termed an attack on his country’s sovereignty. Though many analysts thought that was a bit rich, seeing how his party had in the 1970s fought to keep Bangladesh under Pakistan’s yoke. The Yunus government, which Jamaat strongly supports, and the Bangladesh Army had either failed to detect these Arakanese intrusions or failed to push out the heavily armed soldiers of the rebel army.

Over the last year, the Arakan Army has routed the Myanmarese army from almost the whole of Arakan state and much of Chin state. There had been whispers of earlier intrusions and........

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